I believe there was an experiment making weather data more accessible through the URL bar, e.g. when people start searching for weather there, which could be useful. Presumably, telemetry like this can help determine which of such features to prioritise.

I could indeed also imagine ads, but then not based on keeping a file on you with all your interests and sharing that with advertisers, but by locally choosing between a couple of categories of ads and showing the ones that are related to your current search, without anyone having to know what you’re actually searching for.

I support anonymous telemetry collected by a small non-profit that helps protect our freedom. Not big tech.

That would be a terrible AI.

It’s technically for profit, but it has a single shareholder: the Foundation. There are no greedy shareholders that can get rich off of that profit.

Of course, employees/board members can be richly compensated, but that’s independent of for-/non-profit status.

From what I read in their blog post, nobody is keeping your search history data. It only tracks how often people in general search for things in specific categories, so nobody will be able to learn anything about you specifically from that data.